


How Much, How Little (All That You Are)

by WolfieOnAO3



Series: All That You Are [5]
Category: Raffles - E. W. Hornung
Genre: Angst, Earl's Court Era, I'm really not sure what to tag this as, Love, M/M, Sacrifice, Set somewhere between No Sinecure and The Last Laugh, emily dickinson poetry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-20
Updated: 2020-09-20
Packaged: 2021-03-07 17:08:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,109
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26561164
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WolfieOnAO3/pseuds/WolfieOnAO3
Summary: In this short life that lasts only an hour, How much -- how little! -- is in our power!- Emily Dickinson‘Bunny, what are your plans for after I’m dead?’...Set some time betweenNo SinecureandThe Last Laugh, Raffles thinks upon his own mortality, and what it will mean for Bunny; and Bunny thinks upon what Raffles means tohim.
Relationships: Bunny Manders/A. J. Raffles
Series: All That You Are [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/956619
Comments: 16
Kudos: 17





	How Much, How Little (All That You Are)

‘Bunny, what are your plans for after I’m dead?’

As a cold opener, Raffles' inaugurating gambit after an hour of silence was positively glacial. A jagged black line like a crack through scorched earth scored the page upon which I had been writing as I jerked up from my work to stare at him from across the room. He was leaning against the mantelpiece, cool and collected, looking as fresh and in control in his dark blue pyjamas as most men could only dream of looking whilst wearing their best suits at their best Club. Sunlight streamed through the gaps in the blinds, which needs must remain closed for most of the day to limit the risk of Raffles being seen from the window, and glimmered across his silvery hair, casting him in alternating light and shadow. As I stared at him in dumb confusion from my desk on the other side of our small Earl’s Court sitting room, Raffles merely took another nonchalant drag of his cigarette in silence. He exhaled a ring of blue smoke which drifted up to the ceiling, intermingling in the air with the steam as it rose from his freshly poured coffee.

‘What?’ I replied at length.

‘When I am dead,’ Raffles replied with the measured voice one might use when explaining the obvious to an idiot, ‘what are you planning on doing with yourself?’

‘What the hell sort of a thing is that to ask a chap!’ I cried, finally catching hold of my senses and finding every one of them incandescently angry at him and his agonising and unexpected question.

‘A perfectly sensible one, I should think,’ he replied coolly, ‘given the circumstances.’

‘What circumstances?’ I asked, suddenly wary. It would be all too characteristic of Raffles to have kept some vital, even terminal information back from me, and I felt a thrill of deep-rooted terror tremble through me at his words. ‘What have you done?’

‘Done?’ Raffles laughed. ‘Plenty of things, my dear rabbit, which might be precursors to my being sent out of the game early -- most of which you either know about or have had a hand in! But to set your mind at rest, my dear fellow, nothing which is immediately pressing. That’s not why I asked. It's idle curiosity, nothing more. When the body is constrained, the mind will wander. I’ve been reading Dickinson; _In this short life that lasts only an hour, How much -- how little! -- is in our power!_ A nice little verse, don’t you think?'

‘What? What are you talking about?’ I snapped at him. ‘I don’t want to carry on this conversation, Raffles. If you want to be weirdly morbid, do it by yourself. I’ve an article to finish.’

‘As you wish,’ he said with a little shrug before turning back to the newspaper he’d sprawled over the table. 

I watched him for a moment as he idly read, the subject dropped as cleanly as though he had never raised it. I picked up my pen to continue writing, and then put it down again.

‘Why do you think that you will-- Why are you asking me such dismal things?’ I growled at him, all hope of working ruined for the rest of the afternoon. ‘Why does it matter? Why does it matter _now_?’

Raffles glanced over at me, his expression speculative and mildly surprised, as though I’d asked him out of the blue what colour he thought confusion was, rather than the entirely reasonable query I had raised. It was a look I knew to be entirely calculated, and his attempt to feign nonchalance both irritated and insulted me. 

‘I’d like to know that you are prepared for it,’ he said as casually as though he were reading me the county cricket scores.

‘Why do I need to be prepared?’

‘It’s always good to be prepared for things, Bunny. Nine tenths of all successes lay in the preparation of the thing. I’d like to know that you have paid some thought to it; nothing more sinister than that, my dear fellow.’

_‘Why?’_

He shrugged once again with some indifference, and at last I rose -- though leapt might be a more appropriate verb -- from my seat and crossed the room to face him. 

‘What has brought this on?’ I snapped, unsure whether I was more angry or worried. ‘And don’t keep up this stubborn stoic act, it’s so transparent as to be insulting. If you have something to tell me, Raffles, I ask that you at least pay me the courtesy of saying it outright!’

He looked at me for several seconds, moving from his stooped position leaning on his elbows over his paper to standing tall before me, looking down at me with a searching clear eye. I looked straight back at him with a fiery and piercing glare of my own. Once I believed that A. J. could near enough read the secrets of my heart; I still believed it of him, at times, but now I gave myself the credit that I could read him almost equally as well, and well he knew it.

After a moment Raffles’ shoulders drooped and he sighed. His expression softened, and my heart along with it. 

‘A. J.? What’s wrong?’

He glanced toward the window as though to look out of it, and I caught the grimace which crossed his face as his eye met instead with the closed blinds; one of many constant reminders of his caged and constrained existence. I felt the first stirrings of understanding in my breast.

‘There is a very strong likelihood, Bunny,’ he said slowly, ‘that I will, through one means or another, be called to meet my maker long before you do. Between Scotland Yard, my various enemies within the criminal underworld, and the shoddy state of modern roof tiles, it’s only a matter of time before I’m due to hand over my pennies to that old rascal Charon. I’ve long since made peace with that; it’s not for my sake that I’ve been dwelling on it, but for yours. I need to know that you are as prepared as I am for that outcome, whether it arrives in a week or in a decade. I need to know that you’ll be all right, Bunny. That’s all.’

‘ _Th_ _at’s all!_ ’ I cried with an embittered laugh. ‘You want to know that I’ll be _all right_ when you _die_? That's _all_?! Raffles, I don’t know what you expect me to say to that. I really don’t.’

‘I don’t expect anything, only that you will agree to think on it. I’m not going to be around forever, Bunny; I might not even be around for very _long_ \-- No, no, don’t look at me like that, I’ve no reason to think myself in any very immediate danger. Well, not any more than usual, which is enough. Which is the _point_. I’m not always going to be here, rabbit, and I -- I suppose I want to know that you understand that, too.'

‘Of course I do,’ I hissed through my teeth. ‘In case you’d forgotten, you have already been declared dead once, Raffles. I have already had to go through it!'

‘That was different. I wasn’t really dead.’

‘I didn’t know that!’

‘But you suspected, and that makes all the difference.’

‘Well, yes, but-- But I still lost you, A. J.! I still spent two years thinking I’d never see you again!’

‘I know.’

‘Then why the hell do you feel the need to ask such -- such _stupid_ questions!’

‘Because you are right, and once was bad enough; it is as unfair as it is inevitable that I will put you through that again, and so I want to do what I can, whilst I can, to mitigate the damage. Preparation, my dear rabbit, is the father of success, as I have always taught you.’

I swallowed back my immediate defensive reaction to shout at him again; suppressed my desire to castigate him for being so callously pragmatic and heartlessly cold over something so hellishly distressing. I had learned a great many things in the years since my arrest and Raffles’ leap into the Mediterranean; primary among them was the capacity to act rather than react, and to question the tempestuous emotions which tyrannised my wiser thoughts.

Because A. J. wasn’t being callous or cold; he was, as he always was, trying to protect me, albeit in his own peculiar manner. His method and means might hurt, but his motive was as selfless and great-hearted as ever a thing was, and, I suspected, was motivated as much by sorrow and guilt as by pragmatism and care. Raffles was not invulnerable, no matter what he wanted the rest of the world to think.

I took a breath before venturing to reply, and when I did so, spoke in tones as measured as I was able. ‘I don’t blame you for what happened, you know.’

‘You probably should.’

‘Well, I should probably do a lot of things that I don’t do, and do a lot that I probably shouldn’t,’ I said, and he laughed; though his smile faded as swiftly as it had appeared.

‘I’m living on borrowed time, Bunny, and soon enough I am going to have to pay my debt to the gods; I don’t want the interest on that debt to be at your expense.'

‘I’d pay it, gladly.’

‘I know you would,’ he replied with a soft, sad smile. ‘If you wouldn’t, I shouldn’t need to insist that you don’t.’

‘What, then? I don’t know what you are asking of me.’

‘Only to be prepared for it,’ he said. ‘To expect it. To live neither in fear nor in denial of it. And to live to the very best of your ability afterwards.’

‘Oh, that’s all?’ I said with a weak laugh.

‘That’s all,’ he said.

From the open window behind the blinds the sounds of the street filtered through into our tiny rooms. Children laughing and shouting, a dog barking in the distance, the ever-present rumble of carriages as they ferried people to and fro across the thronging, buzzing, living metropolis that was London; that beloved metropolis from which my dear Raffles, through the consequence of his own actions, had been barred. I knew he felt the sting of it, the weight of it, the loss of it keenly. And I knew too as much as he accepted responsibility for that, he nonetheless resented it. Just as, perhaps, he resented what he believed to be the inevitability of his own early demise, even as he accepted it as the price he must pay for the life which he lived. I _hoped_ that he resented it, for his own sake, not for mine; for the sake of keeping him striving ever onwards towards life and away from that melancholy which coloured the depths of his glittering soul. 

But still, I didn’t want him to _regret_ any of it, and I didn’t want him to believe that _I_ regretted any of it. I knew what Raffles was. I knew the path he walked and the destination to which it was likely to lead him; I had always known, and I loved him in spite of it. In some ways I loved him _for it_ ; for that path was a part of him, as inextricable as his wit, his ingenuity, and his courage. I loved A. J. Raffles for _all_ that he was, the good and the bad, the joyful and the tragic, the victories and the losses. I could have him no other way. I _would_ have him no other way, whether for a lifetime, or for an hour; for as much or as little as I was able. 

Throwing my arms around his neck I pulled Raffles to me and rested my cheek upon his shoulder, pressing a kiss against the side of his throat, breathing in the scent of him, absolving him of his guilt at leaving me before; of his guilt at one day leaving me again. 

‘I will,’ I murmured as A. J.’s arms wrapped around me, holding me tight; as he sighed against me in relief; as he kissed the top of my head. ‘I promise.’ 

‘Thank you,' he said, quietly.

I made a silent vow to myself then, a silent vow to him, that I would be as brave as he believed me to be when the gods made their final demands, no matter how much or how little they asked of me; and that I would stand by Raffles no matter the cost, forever and for always as his steadfast rabbit.


End file.
